The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates: New Excerpt

Peter Warner

An excerpt of The Mole: A Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates by Peter Warner, a fictitious memoir featuring a spy in Cold War era America (available October 22, 2013).

Recruited by a foreign power in postwar Paris and sent to Washington, Winston Bates is without training or talent. He might be a walking definition of the anti-spy. Yet he makes his way onto the staff of the powerful Senator Richard Russell, head of the Armed Services Committee. From that perch, Bates has extensive and revealing contacts with the Dulles brothers, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Alsop, Walter Lippman, Roy Cohn, and even Ollie North to name but a few of the historical players in the American experience Winston befriends—and haplessly betrays for a quarter century.

A comedy of manners set within the circles of power and information, Peter Warner's The Mole is a witty social history of Washington in the latter half of the twentieth century that presents the question: How much damage can be done by the wrong person in the right place at the right time?

Written as Winston’s memoir, The Mole details the American Century from an angle definitely off center. From Suez, the U-2 Crash, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Watergate, the novel is richly and factually detailed, marvelously convincing, and offers the reader a slightly subversive character searching for identity and meaning (as well as his elusive handler) in a heady time during one of history's most defining eras.

Chapter 1

On April 28, 1953, I quit my job as a cataloguer in the map collection of the Library of Congress. After work, I met Robert Cage, my only friend at the Library, at a dreary bar on the other side of Folger Park. Robert had first acknowledged my existence three years before, a month after I started at the Library, when I came to work wearing my baggy Parisian flea market suit with a plaid flannel shirt and a tie. “What are you supposed to be?” he said in a flat, expressionless tone. “A poet manqué?” He was right; it was the poet’s outfit, circa 1950. But Robert was dressed almost identically, and if he had smiled I would have taken his challenge for a bit of ironic humor. But he just stared at me so I said, “Manqué see, manqué do.” I was rather pleased with myself but I got no reaction from him. I must have made some impression, however, because the next time we ran into each other he asked me to sleep with him. When I told him that I wasn’t homosexual, he said: “If I made this mistake, imagine what everyone else must think.”

“Let them,” I said indifferently, though of course I cared. Robert didn’t care what anyone thought of him. We were both marginal people but I was frustrated with my status while he cultivated his nondescript quality. He had dead-white skin, drab brown hair, and bland, impassive features. He wore heavy-soled black work shoes and brought his lunch to the Library in a metal lunch pail. A brief twitch at the corner of his mouth sufficed for his rare smile or frown. A trace of snide insinuation in his voice was his only inflection. I was jealous of his deadpan style though I was too self-conscious to emulate it. We would sometimes take the train together to New York for a weekend. My twin sister, Alice, had moved to New York at about the same time I moved to Washington and I would stay with her and go to the opera and museums. Robert would spend the weekend drinking and going to jazz clubs. During the return trip he would mock my taste for mandarin culture.

“What did Burnson say when you quit?” Robert asked. He was referring to our supervisor, whose attachment to his collections of fire maps and Colonial America maps was pathological.

“It took him a while to realize that I was quitting,” I said. “He couldn’t believe that anyone would choose to leave his little world of maps. The only thing he cared about was whether he would be allowed to replace me.”

I hadn’t actually told Robert what I was going to be doing. He was staring at me in his disconcerting way: his face frozen, his pale eyes fixed intently on mine. It was a look that often impelled people to babble on until he gave some enigmatic hint of approval. But I was immune today.

Finally Robert said: “I imagine they won’t let him replace you for a while. You’ll be good for the budget.” He ordered another whiskey. “And you’re going to be…”

“I’m going to be on Senator Saltonstall’s staff.”

There was a long pause while Robert gathered his imperturbability. I could read his mind: This was a big step for me.*

“Onwards and upwards,” Robert said drily. “That project of yours on the Massachusetts Bay settlement maps seems to have been opportune.”

For a moment I felt exposed: Had my motives been so obvious? “It’s mainly research and some speech writing. Are you surprised?”

“Mildly. I had assumed you were on your way to becoming a Library lifer.” Robert’s disappointment in himself for underestimating me was probably as close to congratulations as I would get from him. “Does Saltonstall know that you’re still a Canadian citizen?”

“Of course. He even promised to expedite the citizenship process. He can put through a private bill for me.”

“It’s just as well that you’re out of here. Once they root all the lefties and perverts out of the State Department, who knows where they’ll turn? They’ll probably start in on the Library. And they’ll have a field day here. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Not that you’d have been in any danger—despite Burnson’s suspicions—but they could get me on both counts.”

“Don’t worry. Nobody cares about the Library.”

Robert regarded me with sour contempt. “Oh you’re a fool and you’re leaving a fool’s paradise.” Robert ran his hand through his hair, as emphatic a gesture as he allowed himself. “They’ll go after the Library too. It doesn’t matter where you work. Like that poor sucker Harris from the Voice of America. And you read those stories about Cohn and Schine in Europe.” Roy Cohn and David Schine had just concluded a faultfinding trip across Europe, which mostly consisted of holding press conferences in various foreign capitals to cavil about how few copies of The American Legion Magazine there were in American embassy libraries.

“At least I won’t have to worry about being threatened by Cohn on the sex front,” Cage said. “Since I’d have no qualms about threatening back.”

It was the first allusion I had ever heard to Cohn’s homosexuality. “You and Cohn? Are you serious?”

“A poignant encounter in Rock Creek Park. Memorable only for the fact that it was Cohn.”

“I think I’m going to meet them tonight. Or Cohn anyway. I’m going to a party at Elizabeth Boudreau’s home. Cohn is supposed to be there.”

At this he raised his eyebrows, which felt to me like a triumph. “And I took you for a silly boy. All this time you have been calculating your future. And now you’re not only off to the Senate, but also entering sophisticated Washington society. All those questions you had about her … you weren’t so casually curious after all.”

Robert was quite drunk. I had been careful to have only one drink because I wanted to be alert at the party later. I stood up and said good night. “Keep in touch,” Robert said and waved to me with his hand high above his head, as if I were sailing away. And I was. It was the first time in three years that I believed I was fulfilling my purpose in Washington. I had felt helpless until now, unsure how to move to some useful vantage point. But when Saltonstall asked my map division to do a favor for the Massachusetts Historical Society, I leaped at the chance and contrived a couple of personal encounters with the senator. He took a shine to me, especially after I showed off my amazing memory by naming all the ships and their captains of the Great Migration, which had carried Saltonstall’s ancestors to the Bay Colony.

* * *

After leaving Robert, I took a trolley to Dupont Circle and then walked across the P Street Bridge to my little garret apartment in Georgetown, which was only six blocks away from Elizabeth Boudreau’s mansion.

A lot of shameless maneuvering had gone into my invitation from Elizabeth—almost as much as had gone into my new job. I met Elizabeth at St. Thomas Episcopal Church of Georgetown, in whose chorus I had volunteered to sing with the very intention of meeting someone like her, as well as some of the government and military figures who seemed to be active at the church.

Elizabeth Boudreau stood out in the chorus. She had a tinny voice and a propensity for missing entrances and singing the wrong words, but she underwrote the choral director’s salary. After some research, I decided to cultivate her. She was a girl from a destitute but “good” southern family who had married Bob “Butch” Boudreau, a Louisiana lawyer. Though not rich or well bred, Boudreau’s avaricious drive promised to revive her sapless family tree. He was an advisor/sidekick to Huey Long, and he and Elizabeth had arrived in Washington in 1933, when she was eighteen. After Long was assassinated two years later, Boudreau stayed on in Washington as a lobbyist for Standard Oil until 1942, when he went off to war. A year later, Boudreau was killed in Italy. Back in Washington, Elizabeth discovered that her estate included several thousand acres of prime oil-producing land in Louisiana. Soon it included a magnificent house in Georgetown.

I did what I could to make Elizabeth notice me. I became the choral director’s favorite because we shared a mutual contempt for the Metropolitan Opera’s ragged chorus. Once the director began holding me up to the others as an example of error-free singing, I plotted to run into Elizabeth in Georgetown. The first time I said hello to her, in a florist’s shop, she didn’t recognize me. But the second time, when I just happened to be passing by as she was leaving her home one morning, occurred the day after a rehearsal during which I had ruined her solo by loudly launching into her part. Again she didn’t recognize me, but this time I approached her and apologized for my blunder. After that we began to chat occasionally during rehearsal breaks. I doubt if I made much of an impression. Although Elizabeth was hardly an A-list hostess in 1953, I was a drone for the Library of Congress and of less than even passing interest. My break came when I mentioned my research on the Bay Colony settlement maps, which I was doing for the Massachusetts Historical Society at Senator Saltonstall’s request. She seemed uninterested, but a few days later she ran into Saltonstall, dropped my name for want of anything better to say, and learned that I was soon going to be a member of his staff. When she called to invite me, I thought at first it was Robert Cage, in drawling falsetto, playing a practical joke.

For the next thirty-five years I would prepare my agenda for the evening as I walked to Elizabeth’s great house in Georgetown. I would decide whom I wanted to meet, what I wanted to learn, what gossip I wished to catalyze at the party. This first night my plans were modest: I hoped to elicit at least one minor indiscretion to pass on to my undeclared watcher, should I ever be asked. As I walked, I rehearsed little speeches—clever things to say about the Library and self-deprecating remarks about my life, which I hoped would be mistaken for false modesty.

I was greeted at the door by a butler and conveyed to Elizabeth in the drawing room, which was decorated then in a clunky version of veranda colonial. Some thirty guests had arranged themselves in small groups. Elizabeth was seated on a large sofa; with her dress splayed in a circle about her she looked like a taffeta water lily. When she saw me, she motioned assertively for me to approach her. She was small boned and blond, with delicate features and piercing blue eyes. A pale flight of freckles softened her sharp features and gave her a girlish appearance. Standing before her was a fat man with a blotchy face whom she introduced in her gentle southern accent as Arthur Barker, a fellow southerner and a member of the new administration. I recognized the name: He was a protégé of Charles Wilson, the secretary of Defense. “Arthur, Winston sings in the chorus…” She paused waiting for Barker to nod. “… at St. Thomas, you know, the church?… And he just about knows more about music than anyone.” Elizabeth spoke in a fluent succession of semi-queries; by the time you had nodded politely three or four times, she would assume you agreed with whatever she was saying. “Arthur has just rented a house in Georgetown … on O Street?… not far from the university. Arthur was just asking me … you know of course they’re trying to desegregate the public swimming pool over on Twenty-ninth Street?”

Barker, encouraged by their mutual southernness, shook his head in disgust at the prospect, but I was pretty sure Elizabeth had reasonably liberal ideas about these issues. I decided that Elizabeth and I would gang up on stuffy Mr. Barker. “I don’t swim myself, but I do think it is about time for us to let little white children and little dark children inhabit the same water,” I ventured.

Elizabeth continued as if I had not uttered a word. “I can’t tell you how important it is that they get the Georgetown pool desegregated immediately.” Barker looked baffled and I smiled complicitly. “You know they just desegregated the Rosedale pool?” she went on. “That leaves Georgetown as the only white pool. This neighborhood is going to be crawling with white riffraff all summer. The pool will be a magnet. But if they desegregate the Georgetown pool, hardly anyone will come—Negroes can’t swim and the white trash will stay away.” She looked from me to Barker fiercely, her piercing blue eyes and sharp features challenging us, and then she chortled, delighted to have enmeshed us in her unique logic.

I sensed I had failed my first trial of socializing but Elizabeth appeared not to notice. We went on to discuss other aspects of Georgetown life at which I was more successful. When drinks arrived, Elizabeth used the interruption to introduce me to an obtuse woman who managed Oveta Culp Hobby’s office. We discussed Call Me Madam though I was unable to tell her what Perle Mesta was really like.

Almost everyone at the party was someone else’s assistant or aide. I didn’t know why Robert had referred to Elizabeth’s salon as sophisticated, though I soon learned she was trying to live that reputation down, playing it safe with a new administration in town. By the end of the Eisenhower years Elizabeth would be enshrined as an A-list hostess and there would be no more invitations for B- and C-list types except for her biannual Thanksgiving Day buffet party. Elizabeth approached me again with a proud smile on her face and a small spidery woman on her arm. “Winston, my literary friend, I have a surprise for you. I want you to meet Ayn Rand.”

“You are a writer too,” Rand declared. She had one of those gruff, metronomic middle-European accents.

I had rehearsed an amusing little speech about becoming a failed poet in Paris in my foolish youth three years before. But some residual literary pride prevented me from trotting my failure out before another writer. “Actually, Miss Rand, I really think of you as a writer-philosopher.”

“Like Burke,” she said.

I took that as an invitation to explore her ideas but I was spared by the arrival of Roy Cohn. Rand spotted him across the room. “He’s here. I have so much I must tell him.” She deserted me without another word.

Cohn too was somebody’s assistant, but his arrival riveted the party. His European boondoggle with Schine had gotten a lot of bad press though I had the feeling Cohn didn’t care. He was sleek and dark and his baggy baleful eyes measured us with sour expectation. The other guests half turned to glance at him surreptitiously as he spoke to Elizabeth, who was in a state of hostess apotheosis at his presence. I watched Rand zero in on Cohn across the room. She didn’t waste any time; she grabbed at his jacket and Cohn flinched. At that moment dinner was announced and Elizabeth led Cohn into the dining room while Rand scuttled along trying to keep Cohn’s attention. As we were sorting out our assigned places, I saw Rand corner Elizabeth. Later I learned she had prevailed upon Elizabeth to change the seating so she could sit with Cohn. There were four tables of eight and Cohn and Rand wound up at my table. I was seated next to Oveta Culp Hobby’s executive assistant.

Rand didn’t waste a minute of Cohn’s time with small talk. “I have wanted to meet you for such a very long time. Have you heard about the work we have been accomplishing in Hollywood?” She pawed at Cohn’s arm again. “We have had many serious meetings with studio heads. We have a newsletter that—”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Cohn asked while he looked around the table.

Rand looked startled. “You have had a brochure from me. With a letter. That is why I am in Washington. We are the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Within a year there will be no films made that do not present a positive depiction of capitalism.”

“Not even Salome?” I murmured.

Cohn jerked his head in my direction. For someone who was essentially humorless, this amounted to a guffaw. But Rand plowed right on. “Tell me about your boss, your Mr. McCarthy. Are you sure he is committed to the fight?”

We hadn’t even sighted the soup and she was putting Cohn on the spot. Rand’s tiny hands were always fidgeting; when they weren’t creeping up Cohn’s sleeve, she held them in a prayerlike position, her fingertips dancing against each other.

“There is something weak about his face. He likes to drink I have heard. This could be exploited by the Communists if you are not careful.”

The rest of us were studiously breaking our bread and arranging our napkins on our laps while we listened intently.

Cohn pursed his lips; she was beginning to annoy him. “Look, Mamie Eisenhower drinks too. You think the Communists are going to get to her?”

That shut her up. It shut everyone else up too for the next five minutes. Since no one smirked or smiled or even became indignant, I was sure Mamie’s dipsomania was a fresh piece of gossip for most of us. Then, with the arrival of the soup, we introduced ourselves to our neighbors and began to converse as if nothing had happened. Cohn was seated to the right of Oveta Culp Hobby’s assistant and I was able to observe him as I made small talk with her. He was bored and restless; his impatient glower made it clear the party wasn’t worth his time or his importance. I was enjoying myself, however. The small talk I made was very small indeed, but my private sense of duplicity, of performing under an invisible spotlight, was immensely pleasurable.

“You have a funny kind of accent. Where are you from?”

It took me a moment to realize that Cohn was speaking to me. “Accent? What did I say? Oh, I must have said ‘aboot’ instead of ‘about.’ I’m Canadian actually.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Here? You mean Washington?”

“No I mean Paris,” he snorted. He looked around the table as if he expected gales of laughter at this sally.

“I’m just about to start working for Senator Saltonstall.”

“You can do that if you’re not American?”

“There’s no legal problem as long as Saltonstall wants me. Besides, my American citizenship is in the works. Speaking of Paris, did you enjoy your visit there?”

His eyes narrowed. I had touched a raw nerve.

“I mean it’s such a wonderful city. I lived there for three years before coming to Washington. Did you see Moulin Rouge? That made me miss Paris. I lived in Paris for three years before moving here. Washington is very beautiful too.” I was blathering uncontrollably. Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so comfortable with my duplicitous self.

“What were you doing there for three years?” Cohn asked. “Working?”

“I worked on and off. It was really a postcollege fling.” To my relief, Ayn Rand interrupted us and Cohn appeared to lose interest in me. But as the party was breaking up, Cohn came over to me.

“What was your name again? I’ll put in a good word for you with Saltonstall.”

I walked home in a panic. How stupid to have engaged Cohn enough to pique his interest in me! Even worse, I had mentioned Paris, where my dubious adventure in Washington first began.…

Chapter 2Paris, 1948

On a splendid morning in early May, I sat with my coffee and croissant at a café on the rue Marbeuf, directly across the street from the apartment building where I rented a large room in a cavernous apartment owned by a World War I widow. Now that spring was firmly in place, Parisians had eagerly shed the dark shabby wool coats that had lasted many of them through four years of occupation and four more years of clothing shortages. I too was emerging from a gloomy period. For almost a year since my arrival in Paris, I had furtively haunted the artistic world I hoped to inhabit. Without ever meeting Cocteau, Picasso, Camus, or any of the other stars of Left Bank culture, I knew them by sight and knew the boulevards and cafés where they could be seen. And now this world, on whose outskirts I hovered in solitary yearning, had wonderfully come to seem within my reach, thanks to my new friends, Viktor and Mara Gregory.

I came upon Viktor and Mara one frigid afternoon in January at the Musée du Jeu de Paume as they stood before a Pissarro landscape. Their excited mix of heavily accented English and French seemed familiar to me and I realized I had seen them several days before at the Café de Flore where they were sitting with the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Naturally, I had eavesdropped on their conversation but the disappointing subject was real estate. Now I saw my chance. With shocking boldness I lurched into their conversation like a demented tour guide, spouting biographical details and secondhand artistic assessments about Pissarro. The bemused Gregorys had never met a Canadian poet before, certainly not one so eager to relate (almost verbatim) every fact about Camille Pissarro he had gleaned from the museum’s official catalog. They let me attach myself to them for the next hour and when we parted they politely asked for my address. When I asked for their address, Viktor demurred and I was sure I would never hear from them again. But one evening three weeks later, as I sat huddled under a blanket in my room, my landlady summoned me to the front door. Standing in the stairwell outside the apartment was a short, pudgy man in a heavy overcoat. An astrakhan hat perched on his head. He had a sallow complexion and the loose jowls of someone who had once been quite fat. I stared at him uncomprehendingly.

He made a little bow. “Winston Bates, it is I, Viktor Gregory. Look at you, shivering like a wretch. You must be fed. Come. Mara awaits us.” I grabbed my coat and Viktor took me by the arm. As we headed down the stairs, Viktor turned on my landlady. “If you do not provide more heat, I shall report you. The deputy mayor is a personal friend of mine.”

He guided me to a nearby brasserie and led me to a table. “Here is Mara,” he announced, grandly waving his arms as if unveiling her. Mara was dark and sensually handsome, with a compact, muscular figure. She rose from the table and returned the gesture to Viktor. I desperately tried to impress the Gregorys that evening, presenting myself as a sophisticated, au courant young poet, who was escaping the bonds of his well-to-do but philistine family in Winnipeg. To my delight, the Gregorys took me up. Soon they were inviting me to meet them at cafés, gallery exhibitions, and recitals. They never gave much notice; Mara or Viktor would come by for me at lunchtime with a plan for the afternoon. I finally worked my way up to an invitation to one of their “evenings.” From the way Mara first described these parties, coyly hinting that someday I might be given the honor of an invitation, I assumed they represented some sort of quintessence of advanced Left Bank culture. But when I began to frequent the Gregorys’ disordered, underfurnished apartment near the Place Maubert, I was taken aback at the way they threw people and food together without much planning before the event or intercession during it. Sometimes there was lots of good humor and laughter; other times everybody stared at each other, stupefied with boredom.

Viktor dropped names shamelessly and I just as shamelessly scooped them up. There was hardly a personality in Paris about whom he did not have a comment or anecdote that demonstrated Viktor’s personal relation to them. I suspected Viktor of exaggerating his range of acquaintances, but he did have some sort of access to the Left Bank world of artists and writers. I had actually met Jean Arp at dinner at Viktor’s. Another time, as Viktor and I walked on the rue de Seine, we encountered Giacometti, looking almost as anorexic as one of his sculptures. Without bothering to introduce me, Viktor made some casual conversation with him. And one morning Viktor waved to me from a crowded table as I entered the Café de Flore; there was André Malraux sitting right next to Viktor. I paused awkwardly before them and Viktor waved again, this time inviting me to walk on.

As we became friendlier, Viktor occasionally insisted on my accompanying Mara on her social rounds while he was engaged in his business affairs, which involved entrepreneurial projects in publishing and theater. He was currently attempting to raise money to produce the work of a Romanian playwright Mara had discovered. According to Viktor, Mara’s grandmother was the illegitimate daughter of the king of Romania. Viktor’s own ethnic identity was a little harder to discern. When I told him I was half Jewish he delightedly embraced me. “Wonderful. I am too.” But other times he variously claimed to be half Greek, half Russian, and half Lebanese.

By the time I finished two coffees and two croissants on this beautiful spring morning, I had less than an hour to kill before meeting Viktor and Mara in the bar at the Hotel Pont Royal. It was a perfect day to walk to the Left Bank. As I crossed the Seine, I felt my usual sense of inadequacy as I approached the world of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. One reason I had located in the Eighth Arrondissement was because the Sixth, with its expectations of creative self-aggrandizement, was too daunting for me; though there were some nights lately, as I labored on my poems in my room, when my writing seemed inspired and powerful enough for me to contemplate my assault on the Left Bank. I actually hadn’t written many new poems since coming to Paris; mostly I had worked at elevating my college poems, which had won a student prize at McGill, to a new, commanding level of mature ambition.

Some time ago Mara had asked to read my work. I wavered for a while but then realized how my refusal would seem childish to someone who was on familiar terms with so many artists and writers. I had finally handed her some poems a few weeks ago, entreating her, in a voice plummy with feigned nonchalance, to find them diverting. Neither Mara nor Viktor had mentioned my poems since. I didn’t know how to bring the subject up nor was I sure I wanted to. But my writing couldn’t have been too much of a disaster because the Gregorys continued to invite me to their soirees and to meet me for drinks, en passant, as they whizzed industriously about Paris.

I found Viktor in the Pont Royal’s dark, clubby bar. He was exchanging a word with a man who was slouched in one of the stuffed leather sofas. Even on a warm day in May, Viktor was fully turned out in a dark, rumpled suit with vest and watch chain. When he saw me, Viktor held up his hand, cautioning me not to interrupt him. A minute later Viktor hurried over and led me to the opposite corner of the room. As Viktor walked he leaned forward and his stubby arms swung as loosely as a rag doll’s from his hunched shoulders; he kept his gaze down and his heavy brows furrowed, as if too preoccupied to watch where he was going. We sank into our armchairs. “You see everybody here, Winston. Absolutely everybody. Before the war that man I chat with was a publisher in Austria. Such a distinguished person! Seeing him in Vienna was like having an audience with the Pope of middle-European literature. Now he tells me he has started a new publishing house in Geneva. I suspect the new house is his home. But he says he wants to publish art books. So who knows? Could be we’ll do some business maybe.”

“You mean he might help you to start your press?” Viktor had occasionally announced his intention of launching a publishing venture. But since he had never described it to me in any detail, I had assumed it was no more serious than his other interests.

“I have mentioned it to you? Well it is getting closer. I have been making plans to publish limited editions. Very fine printing and paper. Small select audience. Not for my friend in Switzerland. On the other hand, maybe I will do business with him.” Viktor pointed to a tall, pale man who was standing at the entrance to the bar and peering into the dark depths where we sat. “One of the most important art dealers in London. His father too, and his father before him.” Viktor waved and the man waved back tentatively. Viktor continued: “The whole thing starts again. Europe I mean. Art. Books. Music. And they all come here. Those of us who sort out culture as well as the ones who create it. You know who was just here and you missed? Sartre. Yet Mara has told me this bar is already passé among Existentialists. Now tell me everywhere you have been going and everything you have seen.”

I started to tell him about an exhibit at the Bibliothèque but he quickly interrupted.

“Look, Winston. Mara arrives.”

Mara specialized in breathless entrances, always rushing from one exciting moment to the next. She cloaked her solid figure in flowing, robelike dresses and richly embroidered jackets and kept her long black hair in braided piles or buns on top of her head with the aid of elaborate pins and brooches. Her makeup was overt, her perfume strong, and she draped herself in costume jewelry that flashed and jangled with her spirited gestures. She greeted me with a kiss, then dipped a napkin in Viktor’s glass of water and scrubbed away at the lipstick mark she had left on my cheek.

“Mara, Mara,” Viktor said. “Do we have good news for Winston?”

“We always have good news for Winston but today is especially good news.”

We all waited expectantly.

“So Mara, tell the young man. He is too shy to ask.”

“Winston, you are a very fine poet.”

Viktor sat back and beamed at me. “You feel good, no? You should. Mara knows many poets. Éluard had a crush on her. He asked her to run away with him.”

I did feel good. After all, Mara was the first person to whom I had shown my work in Paris, though an unseized opportunity with Paul Éluard did not seem to me to be the strongest of critical credentials. On the other hand, if she did know Éluard and other poets, and she did like my work, she might help it to get read in serious circles. I decided to be pleased with Mara’s endorsement.

“Before the war, Winston,” Viktor continued, “I am instrumental in helping a number of artists to publish their work in limited editions, éditions luxes. We help them to produce and sell artists’ books and sometimes portfolios of etchings. Next time you are at my home, ask me to show you the book I made with Max Ernst. Sometimes I introduce my friends who are writers to my artists so they can make books together. So it is time for me to start again.” Viktor reached across the table. “Shake my hand, Winston.”

I grasped his hand uncomprehendingly.

“You have shaken the hand of your publisher.”

I was suddenly weak with eagerness and confusion. I had only recently begun to think of sending my work to one or another of the small badly printed literary magazines that littered serious bookstores. I saw the publication of my work in almost any form as a passport to the Left Bank, where my new confrères and I would practice art and literature in a state of hectic ecstasy. The thought was on my mind almost constantly now, as if I were poised to dive into very chilly waters. Now someone was ready to push me in.

“Viktor, tell our young man what you have in mind,” Mara said.

“What I have in mind is that the poems of Winston Bates will be published in a very fine limited edition and they will be illustrated by one of the most famous of modern artists. What I have in mind is that someday this will be a famous publication, very rare and very valuable. Collectors will prize it because it is beautiful, because a famous artist has been inspired to do some of his finest work, and because that inspiration comes from the first published work of the famous poet Winston Bates. Now we drink to our book together.” He summoned a waiter and ordered champagne.

“I can’t believe this news,” I said. “I never expected anything like this. How are you going to find the artist to illustrate the book? Won’t he have to speak English?”

“We have found one.” Viktor grasped his lapels and proudly inflated his stout, little chest. “I have spoken to Picabia. He is interested.”

I must have looked as I felt, bewildered and distressed. What did Picabia’s art have in common with the bitter elegance of my poetry?

“I cannot understand … you look disappointed. I have tried to make for you a wonderful surprise.” Viktor rapidly deflated, and looked as if he were on the verge of tears. He looked helplessly to Mara for reassurance.

“It is a big surprise for Winston. Perhaps he has not seen very much of Picabia’s work.”

“I haven’t. I’ve seen very little.” My passport to the Left Bank floated tantalizingly before me. “But I like it. I’ve always liked it … what little I’ve seen.” Mara and I had just seen an exhibit of Picabia’s paintings: The work was interesting but rarely pleasing, with strange biomorphic shapes on monochromatic backgrounds. “Do you think he understands my work?”

“When you see what he does, you will understand your own work better. This is how it is done. Picabia takes you under his wing, gives you a profile, an introduction.” Viktor searched my face eagerly for a sign of assent and nodded encouragingly.

“It does sound wonderful … but it seems so strange. Everything is all arranged and I haven’t done a thing.”

Viktor cleared his throat. “A few arrangements are still to be made. I will need to line up investors who will subscribe to the edition. Not so easy these days.”

Peter Warner grew up in New York and graduated from NYU. For many years he worked as a publisher and editor at a book publishing company in New York and London. He is married with three children and has lived in Hoboken, New Jersey since 1987. A previous novel, Lifestyle, was published in 1985.